Obviously, part of a series.
When we last left our protagonist, he was talking about how before college, he had only been to a single barber in his life.
For most of college, my barber was, well, nobody. My girlfriend (now wife) liked my hair long, to the point where she cried the only time I had to cut my hair and shave my beard for a job. I decided on a goal: Grow out my hair until it could be put into a ponytail. My hair reached shoulder length, and my girlfriend tied my locks up for the maiden voyage, and the feeling of constantly having my forehead yanked backwards was so annoying, it was gone within a few minutes.
Eventually, I had to have my hair cut for internship interviews, and settled on a barber a 10 minute walk from my apartment with a guy who we'll call Trevor. Trevor was a mid-30s something man with frosted tips who was...well, I don't want to comment specifically on his sexuality (because you never really know), but he styled the wigs for all the drag queens in town. If Trevor wasn't gay, he was like a viceroy among monarch butterflies - he had the entire world fooled with his clever disguise.
Trevor was fun to talk to. He shared anecdotes about his daughter (yes, daughter) and her trials and tribulations in high school. He gossiped with the soft-spoken (male) receptionist about their friend group, who seemed to be mostly people about the same age who were only just now becoming adults. His barber shop was full of fashion magazines and trendy little local papers with stories about up-and-coming local artists and indie movies (they were rather light on the misadventures of puppies, though). I paid my ~$12 bill by swiping my card on the store iPad, tipping by tapping the appropriate button when prompted. Ultimately, though, you go to a barber for a haircut. Trevor was skilled - he was usually booked usually for a week in advance - but the styles he chose for my hair were inevitably a stylish, androgynous look that made it look like I was on my way to a scene music concert or on my way to an important meeting I had just set up through Grindr, and it just wasn't the style for me.
From there, I bounced around to various barber equivalents of a doc-in-the-box: Chain salons where stylists of uneven quality cut similarly uneven hair. I used to be puzzled at jokes about getting an ear cut while getting your hair cut, but after spending a harrowing 30 minutes under the knife while the distracted hairdresser behind you talks enthusiastically about how an underground, exclusive tattoo artist is in town, and she's doing everything in her power to get him to do a sleeve on her in a day, you start to worry not about whether they're going to casually draw blood, but what type of hepatitis shot you're going to need to get afterwards.
It's not that every haircut I got at one of these places was bad, but there was always something off each time I went. One time, it was that the stylist managed to remove almost all the length of my hair without even touching her thinning shears; as I said before, I basically only get a haircut when it's so overheated I can't take it anymore, so it kind of defeated the whole purpose of the affair. Another time, I was having a wonderful conversation with an Indian barber about the pain and horror that xenophobia and hate cause the human race, when he excitedly began talking about an episode of an "ancient aliens" show he watched that claimed that the Bhagavad Gita was primarily about (wait for it) aliens. Apparently, he found their argument pretty persuasive. I still paid my ~$20 and tipped by marking it on the receipt, but lost equal quantities of hair and faith in humanity.
Recently, my wife has made friends with a stylist at a place just down the road; her stylist's boyfriend is a barber, and my wife and her stylist friend decided that I needed to go to him for my next cut. Unfortunately, his shop is a bit further away, but my wife made the appointment for me by text (the shop doesn't have its own phone - each guy just uses his own personal cellphone).
The barbershop is a black barbershop - at least, most of the barbers and clientele are black, and when I was looking for the (nonexistent) phone number online, I found a few posts of black mothers looking for a good place in town to get a fade for their sons, and being referred to it. I listened to a rap radio station from an iPhone plugged into a speaker while admiring the posters of boxers hung on the walls. My barber was a man most likely in his 20s, arms (and legs, visible beneath baggy shorts) covered in tattoos.
Unlike Randy's private room, the store was wide open from front to back; this meant that the whole shop had one group conversation. The topics were 1) ragging on the owner's poor decision to spray paint his tires, use paint remover on the spray paint, and then ordering new tires to replace the ones destroyed by paint remover and 2) a rival shop across town that was slandering them for their higher prices, while the rival shop was apparently so bad that after a haircut, people were forced to have buy the second, more expensive haircut to fix the first one. Another effect of the wide open floor plan was a direct view of the street: Whenever an attractive woman walked past, all conversation and work stopped until she was out of sight.
I paid my $20 and tip in cash - they didn't take card - and left with a nice haircut that unfortunately seems like the kind you need to have repeatedly to keep it looking correct. As you can guess, my hair doesn't look quite correct right now.
I still haven't quite found what I'm looking for in a barbershop.
No comments:
Post a Comment